Animals are masters of intuitive communication. Unlike us, no one ever trained them to repress their intuition. They never had anyone tell them that mentally sending and receiving thoughts and emotions was silly or make-believe. Animals know that staying tuned in to their intuition helps them to optimize life and make the best choices from moment to moment. No matter how domesticated the animal, he or she is always aware that following your intuition can mean the difference between life and death. This would explain why many animals involved in the Asian tsunami in 2004 moved to higher ground right before the wave hit, while most people did not. While some people did sense the tsunami and sought higher ground just as the animals did, many others may have had some kind of internal warning, which they then disregarded.

Animals pay attention to the information that comes to them intuitively as hunches and feelings. Humans, on the other hand, have been trained to disregard such impressions as inconsequential. From the moment we are born, we are subtly, and sometimes overtly, conditioned to tune out our intuition. Intuitive information often comes in the form of feelings, and feelings are not so acceptable in our modern-day, ultralogical culture. As we grow up we are encouraged to suppress emotion and rewarded for being rational. Do you recall any of these phrases from your childhood?
“Honey, you are just imagining things.”
“You know animals can’t talk.”
“Be grown-up.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Don’t make things up.”
“You don’t know that; you can’t prove it.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Don’t get emotional.”
And for boys: “Stop acting like a girl.”
We actually receive information from our intuition all the time — like getting a definite feeling, good or bad, about someone we have just met — but we block ourselves from recognizing it. Fortunately, we aren’t completely successful at this, and our intuition regularly breaks through our barriers, especially in a crisis. Have you had any of the following intuitive experiences?
Knowing when someone is lying to you or manipulating you.
Getting a strong feeling that you should (or shouldn’t) do something (and finding out you were right).
Knowing from a distance when something is wrong with your baby or one of your animals.
Thinking of someone and getting a call or letter from the person.
Knowing how someone is feeling.
Knowing something is going to happen before it does.
Knowing who is calling before you pick up the phone.
Intuitive communication is the hypersensitive ability to pick up and transmit information without speech and without relying on body language; it is sending and receiving information mentally and emotionally. Although often considered a New Age
phenomenon, I view it as an ancient skill that is now being revived. I believe our ancestors were as adept at intuitive communication as animals are today, and that they were in constant intuitive connection with one another and with all aspects of nature.
With their unobstructed intuitive senses, animals are able to read minds. They know what a person or another animal is thinking and feeling and are able to see, in their mind’s eye, the images in the mind of another. One of my students, Triny Fischer, told me this story about how her now-deceased dog, Nora, demonstrated this ability.

Nora was a 120-pound malamute and the incident happened several years ago when they were in Florida for the winter. Nora had always lived in cold climates, and she was finding the heat and humidity of Florida not to her liking. To lift Nora’s spirits, Triny would take her to the beach at sunrise and sunset. They always went to one particular beach because it was rarely crowded and had a lovely wooded trail that ran along the shore. The beach was once a hangout for nudists, and even though nudism was illegal, it was not unusual to see a nude swimmer or sunbather there. Triny was not bothered by this and paid little attention to it.

Triny describes Nora as a wonderful, loving dog who simply adored all people. But Nora didn’t like small white dogs. One particular evening at sunset, Triny noticed a woman and her small white dog following behind them on the beach. Triny tried to hustle Nora up and put some distance between them and the little white dog. As she did, she caught sight of a nude man crouched behind some bushes. When Nora saw this man, she stopped and would not move. Normally, Nora would happily approach anyone she met on the beach, nude or otherwise. Triny put Nora on a leash and tried to make her keep walking. In response, Nora did several uncharacteristic things. She barked at the man, refused to move forward, and raised her lip when he stood up. Nora only moved when Triny started walking in the opposite direction, away from the man. This irritated Triny because she didn’t want to have an unpleasant encounter with the little white dog, but Nora, being 120 pounds, got her way. The woman and the white dog circled around them and continued down the beach. As Triny and Nora headed toward the car, the man appeared out of the bushes a few more times, and each time Nora would make a low-pitched howl and walk faster. Once they reached the car, Nora was perfectly fine, as if nothing had happened.
The next morning, Nora and Triny returned to the beach and found yellow police tape everywhere. Triny learned that the night before, just after sunset, a woman walking the beach with her small white dog had been raped, beaten, thrown into the water, and left for dead. The woman had regained consciousness and dragged herself onto the beach. Her dog had alerted a couple walking on the beach, who then discovered her. The woman received critical medical care that saved her life. Triny told the police about her own experience the previous evening, and her description of the man matched the one given by the woman. Triny knew that Nora had saved her from that man. From then on she paid keen attention to any intuitive warnings Nora gave her. One could speculate that Nora had actually been reading the man’s body language, not his emotions or thoughts, but Triny did not see anything unusual about the man. He was not acting in an aberrant manner, as far as she could tell.

How Intuitive Communication Works
Intuitive communication is not about reading body language. You do not even have to see an animal you wish to talk with. You can just get a description of the animal, connect emotionally, and start sending feelings or thoughts to the animal mentally. Information can be sent or received mentally as an emotion, a physical feeling, a picture, a word, a phrase, an idea, a scenario (like a movie), a smell, or a taste. Sending information intuitively to animals is easy because they are so good at receiving. Learning to receive information back from animals can be more difficult, since we are so used to repressing the intuitive information we receive. Intuitive messages can take a while to sink in, as this story from another student, Karen Hudson, illustrates.

Karen sold her horse, Sundust, to someone she thought would be a good match. But it didn’t work out, and the people sold the mare to someone else. They told Karen they’d found Sundust a good home, but a couple of years later Karen started to have dreams about Sundust, and felt she should check up on the horse. She decided to run an ad in the paper. When there was no response, she gave up. But she kept on getting the feeling she needed to check up on Sundust, so she ran another ad. Someone eventually responded, and Karen found out that Sundust had been passed to seven different people and had even been sold at auction. Karen now believes that the feelings she was having about Sundust corresponded to times when the horse was being mistreated. She is sure that Sundust was calling out to her for help using intuitive communication, but the only time Karen’s busy mind could quiet down enough to hear was at night in her dreams. As it turned out, Karen was able to buy Sundust back, and she plans to keep her for the rest of her life.

I equate the ability to perceive intuitively with ESP (extrasensory perception), telepathy, your sixth sense, and psychic ability. Everyone is born hardwired with intuitive abilities; we have just forgotten how to use them. Two researchers in the field of intuitive communication, Danny K. Alford (known as Moonhawk)1 and Walter Greist,2 concluded that intuitive communication is the foundation underlying all spoken communication.

Based on the results of experiments he conducted, Greist hypothesized that every time we speak we are concurrently sending intuitive information. For example, if you tell someone about your wonderful vacation at the ocean, you are at the same time and without your volition or awareness sending the person images of where you went, physical feelings of how it felt to be there, and emotional feelings that you had while there. Conversely, if someone is telling you about her great hiking trip, you are receiving from her, without realizing it, images, sensations, and feelings of the experience she had while on her trip. The trick to communicating intuitively is to gain conscious control and awareness of this process, which is, as I’ve said, now largely unconscious in most modern human beings.

Moonhawk, who was part Native American, combined his studies of indigenous cultures, quantum physics, linguistics, and parapsychology into an integrated field that he termed “quantum linguistics.” Moonhawk put forward the hypothesis that intuitive communication is the prototype of language. He identified intuitive communication as the “old language,” used by all indigenous cultures, and the method for achieving communication between all forms of life on earth.

He felt that no concept of language would be complete unless it included the idea of the “old language.” He saw intuitive communication as a basic flow of meaning and perception, a primitive form of knowing. He defined the ability to read the emotional
intentions of another as a system of information transfer that predates the development of speech and provides the foundation of language. He claimed that without the continuing unconscious operation of the “old language” in the background of our consciousness, the words we speak would make no sense. The limitations of current models of linguistics, he stressed, are that they do not allow for consciousness or telepathy as active factors in human communication. Moonhawk, as a student of indigenous languages, felt that these languages more closely approach intuitive communication. He designated intuitive communication, not Esperanto, as the true universal language, for it is a language already possessed by all people and all species on earth.

Spoken Language Versus Intuitive Language
Intuitive communication does not have a lot in common with the linear, spoken, word-based communication we consider to be true communication. For one thing, with intuitive communication, you can convey whole stories and lifetimes of data in a nanosecond. When I intuitively ask a shelter animal to tell me about his past, I often receive an instantaneous download of information on his early life as a puppy: whom he went to, how his previous people treated him, how he felt about them, what his previous houses and people looked like, and why he ended up at the shelter.

Another difference is that you can do this from a distance; you do not have to be present with an animal to be able to talk intuitively. I know this from my own experimentation with animals over the years, and it has been the experience of every other animal communicator I know. Researcher Ronald Rose documented this same ability in Aborigines. In the 1950s, he spent seven years among Aboriginal tribes in Australia, studying and documenting their intuitive abilities.3 Rose found that the tribespeople he studied could send and receive information intuitively over long distances. In a pretechnological culture such as that of the Aborigines, where there was no form of long-distance communication and tribes were separated by many miles, it makes sense that people would have a highly developed ability to communicate intuitively. Most often, the information the Aborigines received had to do with an illness or death of a family member, and much of the data was corroborated by witnesses outside of the tribe, such as
missionaries or cattle ranchers. It is interesting that the Aborigines would sometimes receive the information by conversing with a totem animal, rather than from direct mental contact with a person.

A final difference between intuitive and verbal communication is that intuitive communication can transcend linear time. For example, one can converse with the spirit of an animal who has died and get accurate information about that animal. Lori Ammerman, another student of mine, found this out after reading my first book, Learning Their Language. In the book I suggest that people try to communicate intuitively with my animals, including my horse Dylan, who was alive when I wrote the book in 2003. When Lori connected with Dylan in 2007, she experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Then the idea popped into her head that Dylan had died, which had in fact just occurred. There would have been no way for her to know that except through intuition. So even after an animal dies, you can still connect and get information about the animal, since in intuitive communication you are connecting with the higher self or spirit of the animal.
In chapter 2, I will teach you in detail how to communicate intuitively with animals, but the basic process is easy to describe. You send information either by speaking out loud, thinking a message, or sending a feeling or an image to the animal. Remember, animals are masters at this; rest assured that they will receive what you send. To receive information, you make contact with the animal mentally and emotionally, and then pay attention to every intuitive impression that comes into your awareness. It is best to record these impressions as you perceive them because it can be hard to track and remember them otherwise. While this process may sound easy, its simplicity is deceptive. What most people find is that their rational minds try to take over the process, striving to choose the “right” or more plausible answers, which effectively cuts off intuition. With practice you learn to override your rational mind and focus instead on the flow of information coming to you intuitively.

Scientific Research into Intuitive Communication
How is intuitive communication possible? The best answers to that question come from quantum physicists. Some of the best analysis of the research in this field has been done by Lynne McTaggart.4 In her most recent book, The Intention Experiment, she reviews the major researchers and experiments that have contributed to current theories about how our world works and how intuitive communication might be possible. I will summarize McTaggart’s findings, but even though I had an ex–rock star for a physics teacher in college, it was never my best subject.

The theories of quantum physics are at a great divergence from the accepted theories of Newtonian physics. Quantum physicists propose that the universe is not a place where all objects move within three-dimensional space according to fixed laws of motion and time. Rather, the universe is more like a single organism of interconnected energy fields in a continuous state of becoming. This continuous interconnected energy field is called the Zero Point Field, so named because even at temperatures of absolute zero, where one would expect an absence of movement, tiny fluctuations of matter are detectable. This constant fluctuation and movement is termed entanglement. Physicists postulate that
the Zero Point Field activity is affecting all particles and all matter, equally, throughout the universe. In other words, we are all connected by this field of energy — we are all one, we are all entangled.

By virtue of this constant connection and energy entanglement, we are in contact with all beings and all things in the universe at all times. Using our intention, we can focus, connect, and communicate with whomever or whatever we choose. In discussing the significance of this theory, McTaggart writes:
If all matter in the universe was interacting with the Zero Point Field, it meant, quite simply, that all matter was interconnected and potentially entangled throughout the cosmos through quantum waves. And if we and all of empty space are a mass of entanglement, we must be establishing invisible connections with things at a distance from ourselves. Acknowledging the existence of the Zero Point Field and entanglement offers a ready mechanism for why signals being generated by the power of thought can be picked up by someone else many miles away.5

Another important researcher into the existence of intuitive communication is Cleave Backster,6 a lie-detector specialist who discovered that living organisms could read and respond to human thoughts. His work includes some of the most comprehensive experiments conducted to prove the existence of interspecies telepathy, most of which, oddly enough, were done using plants and invertebrates. Backster stumbled upon his discovery one day in 1966, when, out of curiosity, he hooked up his lie-
detector equipment to his dracaena plant. A lie detector measures increases and decreases in electrical resistance. An increase in resistance in a human subject indicates stress, which is present when someone is lying. Backster watered the plant and then put the electrodes on a few leaves sandwiched together to see if there would be any change in resistance when the water reached the leaves. He expected to see an upward trend in the ink tracings, corresponding to a drop in the plant’s electrical resistance as moisture increased. Instead, he saw a downward trend and a short spike, mimicking a human stress response. He assumed that he was observing an emotional response from the plant.7 To test further, he decided to find something that would cause an immediate dramatic response in the plant. He tried putting the plant’s leaf in his coffee, but got no response. He realized he would have to do something more dramatic. He thought about getting a match and burning the leaf. At the moment he had that thought, his recording pen went to the top of the strip and almost jumped off. The plant had reacted just to the thought of being burned.

Backster conducted untold numbers of experiments proving that plants and animals are telepathic. He even showed that plants reacted when something else was harmed, such as when a group of brine shrimp was killed. He recorded evidence of a reaction to human emotional highs and lows, especially to threats or some kind of negative intention, in paramecia, mold cultures, eggs, and even yogurt. He discovered that these reactions were not depen-dent on distance: there could be a reaction to his thoughts whether he was present with the plants or separated by many miles. He concluded that the organisms he studied were not just reacting to his thoughts but were communicating telepathically with everything alive in their environment. He discovered, too, that plants could learn to tell whether someone really intended to do them harm or not.

Backster’s work is unorthodox; because of this, he has not received the support and recognition he deserves. It took the investigations of two respected physicists, Fritz Popp and Konstantin Korotkov,8 to finally legitimize Backster’s findings. These two researchers discovered that thought transmissions are occurring constantly within organisms (from one part of the body to another), between organisms, and between an organism and its environment. The vehicles for these transmissions are quantum light emissions called biophotons. Thoughts are, therefore, equivalent to a stream of photons. As such, they can travel through time and space. It appears Backster was right: plants and animals can intercept and perceive human thoughts, and we theirs.

Few scientists dedicate themselves to the study of telepathy in animals. One of these is Rupert Sheldrake, a British microbiologist. Using statistically verifiable research techniques, he proved, with very little probability of error, that in a controlled environment with no possibility of environmental clues, animals could predict when their owners were coming home. His book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home9 is about this and other intuitive or psychic phenomena in animals.

The bulk of evidence for intuitive communication with animals is being collected by people actually engaged in animal communication, both professionals and students. This body of information is anecdotal, and as such is largely disregarded by mainstream science. However, anecdotal evidence is the basis for many traditional scientific inquiries, such as human drug and pain studies. The sheer volume of anecdotal evidence for the existence of intuitive communication between species ought to qualify it as significant data.

A Word About Accuracy
Most people who do intuitive or psychic readings claim an 80 to 90 percent accuracy rate for the information they receive. In my classes, I ask students to connect intuitively with an animal and write down their impressions. Afterward, they verify these impressions with the animal’s person, placing a check mark next to something that is accurate, an X when it’s inaccurate, and a question mark if the answer cannot be verified. I consistently observe a high level of accuracy in my beginning students. Within the first hour of training, they are able to achieve rates of 70 to 90 percent accuracy for their testable results. After they have checked their answers, I ask students to go back and circle the impressions they feel they could not or would not have made up themselves. These are the results that end up convincing people that intuitive communication is real and accurate.

For example, Susie Henkel asked the dog she was connecting with whether he liked children. In response, she got a positive feeling. Then she saw a picture in her mind of a blond girl with a ponytail in a pink ski jacket. The dog’s person corroborated this information, saying, “Oh yes, that’s my niece. He loves her. He loves all children.”
In one exercise, I have people ask an animal they don’t know to describe his or her home, both inside and out. The results can be spectacular, with accurate and specific descriptions of vegetation, architectural design, colors, decor, flooring, and the layout of rooms — information that would be impossible to know except by intuitive communication.
This rate of accuracy is achievable with practice. There is always the chance for error or bias, so one must take that into account. What tends to happen to beginning students is that after a few successes at intuitive communication, their rational brains kick in and they start to question, critique, and doubt themselves. The process then is to find a way back to that experience of receiving easily and accurately. As I tell my students, I don’t have to teach people how to communicate intuitively; they already know how. My job is to teach people how to recognize and become convinced of their ability.

Exercise
Reclaiming Your Intuition

To reclaim and revitalize your own intuition, the first place to start is with your emotions. Often in my consultations, I will convey what I hear from a person’s animal, and the person will respond, “I knew that was true. I had a feeling about it, but I didn’t trust myself to believe it.” Feelings are the front lines when it comes to intuition. If you have a feeling about something, pay attention to it; don’t just brush it off. Keep a diary and write down those vague musings, then reread them later to review what your intuition told you. Most of the time, what we feel turns out to be true. But we are trained to completely override this inner navigation system, following instead the advice of just about anyone but our own selves!

Intuitive information can come to you in a variety of ways: feelings, images you see in your mind’s eye, memories of other situations that have relevance to the present, and words or phrases that pop into your head. Some people even get virtual sensory data, like phantom physical feelings, smells, and tastes. The key to reclaiming intuitive information is to accept it. Try this experiment: Whenever you find yourself in a quandary about a decision between two or more options, try consulting your intuition. Get a pen and paper and sit quietly. Consider each option and record your intuitive data for each. To do this, first set your intention to receive intuitive guidance about each option. Then write the first option at the top of the page. Now immediately begin sensing what intuitive data you are receiving and write it down. I liken this process to a radar scanner. Your sole purpose is to recognize incoming data and record it. Don’t judge it or try to alter it; just record it as accurately as you can. Again, you may receive feelings, thoughts, memories, or other data. No matter what comes in, just write it down. Do the same for each option. Then compare what you have written. My guess is you will have received some pretty clear guidance about what to do, courtesy of your intuition.

Another technique for jump-starting your intuition is to pay close attention to how you are feeling in any given situation. Make it a habit to stop and do an internal check of your emotions. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t! The consequence of ignoring your feelings is that your intuition will retreat and become less and less apparent and accessible. If you want to truly hear the messages from your intuition, you have to honor your feelings.